1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to color-controllable optical devices and more particularly to optical, color-styling devices.
2. Prior Art
It is known in the art to construct colored images in a controllable or repeatable manner by giving the operator means to measure the properties of the light being used. For example, in U.S. Pat. No. 3,945,731, issued Mar. 23, 1976, to Michael Graser, Jr., an optical display apparatus is described for producing a colored design by adjusting different zones of a diffraction grating and measuring and controlling the intensity of each contributing spectral component. Three detectors are used for color measuring, and light-attenuation control is achieved through the use of rotatable neutraldensity wedges interposed in the color-light beams. While such a display apparatus is useful in color-styling, the use of a diffraction grating and fiber optics results in a loss of flux which reduces image brightness if ordinary tungsten lamps are used. Also, diffraction gratings are costly and the preparation of such gratings for every desired design can be expensive. It is desirable to have a color-styling apparatus that does not have costly or imperfect optical and control systems and which is light in weight and small in size in order to be portable.
U.S. Pat. No. 3,782,815, issued Jan. 1, 1974, to Raymond E. Kittredge describes a visual display system wherein a single projected color, representing a fill-in portion of a sky scene contained in a transparency is capable of being varied through a range of shading to match a reference sky color contained in a film frame. This system only varies a single color and would not find use in color-styling a design where colors are varied over the complete color range for each selected portion of the design.
A commercially available multiple projection color simulator is the Teijin Color Simulator available from the Japan Color Institute. Results obtained with this simulator are unsatisfactory due to its bulk and overall operating complexities. Also, the Teijin Simulator has no provision for quantification of the viewed color changes since it has neither a detector nor any electronic memory provision for implementation of color control.